From the school that gave us Adele and Winehouse, meet black midi
No matter how many bands you’ve heard in your life, the young English band black midi doesn’t sound quite like any of them. Mixing fractured melodies, wild guitar heroics and tricky song structures, they land somewhere between prog-rock, avant-punk and pure chaos.
And by the way, all three of them (plus a founding member on hiatus) are 20 and 21 years old. And according to bassist Cameron Picton, the sound was there as soon as they first plugged in. “The essence was there, it wasn’t far off from what our first record sounded like,” he said last week. “We were all school friends and we all grew up around music, though the specific things we liked were pretty different from each other. Maybe the vibe was a little more droney when we first placed, in a school-showcase kind of situation. The others did a couple gigs without me, but I joined when the songs started becoming less than 20 minutes long.”
The school they attended was the BRIT school, the UK’s most famous performing arts school and the alma mater of Adele, Amy Winehouse and others. Ed Sheeran famously dissed the place in his hit “You Need Me, I Don’t Need You,” and perhaps in response, black midi dissed Sheeran in a single, “Ded Sheeran,” that was posted online and deleted in a hurry.
“The most important thing about the school was that there were two or three teachers that really knew and liked music, and that helped us a lot. The school is free, it’s a government funded school that you have to audition to get in. It probably helped to get so much money pumped into it, so the reputation helped a lot. But if the teachers weren’t good you’d hate to see so many millions get pumped into it.”
Black midi held off on releasing anything for the first couple of years they toured; they also avoided interviews and didn’t even put any songs online. This helped build a mystique around them, especially after a South by Southwest show in 2019. It looked like a brilliant marketing strategy, but Picton says it was a complete accident.
“We had no idea what we were doing, and it’s really pretty stupid to delve into the music industry at 18 when you don’t know about anything important. We heard advice about trying to make money in a predatory way, like people in the music industry do, at least people in that age at that school. A lot of them get bad advice, and we heard so many horror sto
ries about people being unlucky. So we took our time and got incredibly lucky. Over that time we learned to play live properly, all the things a normal band would do, but it’s just that the big hype arrived so quickly. It became about this band that you only heard about by
word of mouth, and you had to see them live. But it really came from us trying to protect ourselves.”
Much of the current album “Cavalcade” — a semi-concept album about people with outsized personalities, including a cult leader and Marlene Dietrich — is being
played live for the first time on the current tour, which hits the Sinclair in Cambridge on Monday. And Picton reveals that the third album was already recorded over the past couple of months. Asked what it sounds like, he cuts to the chase: “It sounds really good.”